Nylon - May 2004

True To Life
Written by Nancy MacDonell Smith | Photography by Terry Richardson

An S&M typist. A rebellious Wellesley girl. An Englishwoman in Kabul. Maggie Gyllenhaal plays women who follow their own lead - just like she does.

Maggie Gyllenhaal is concentrating on her salad. She’s making decisive jabs at it, forking up good-sized portions of avocado and greens and chewing thoughtfully. She’s trying to come up with an answer to the questions she’s just been asked about her role in Tony Kushner’s play Homebody / Kabul, which opens this month at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), and she’s not the kind of girl to give a flip reply. It’s not the first time Gyllenhaal has played Priscilla (she did a run of the play at Center Theatere Group’s Mark Taper Forum in L.A. last November), but Kushner’s revised the script, and the actress, a stickler for thorough characterization, is reevaluating her portrayal.

Like most of the roles the actress has tackled, Priscilla provides her with plenty to sink her teeth into. The script hints at a troubled adolescence, complete with an unwanted pregnancy, an abortion, and a suicide attempt. And then there’s the reason she’s in Kabul, where the action is set. It seems that Priscilla’s mother developed an inexplicable fascination with the Afghan city, a violent and lawless place where she may or may not have met a horrific death. Priscilla and her father have arrived to figure out what happened. Written before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and set in 1998, Homebody / Kabul is eerily prescient. English and completely clueless about what’s been going on in Afghanistan, Priscilla and her father have no idea what they’ve gotten themselves into. Though most of the action takes place in their hotel room, Kabul’s volatile nature is never far from the imagination.

Gyllenhaal levels a steady look across the table. “I almost don’t want to talk about Priscilla with you,” she says at last. “I’m really in the process of reimagining her. There a joy in her now that maybe wasn’t there in the published draft. A kind of complicated and bittersweet joy; there’s something almost exhilarating in her grief. I’m learning so much about her right now that I don’t feel totally equipped to talk about her. She’s been a part of me for so long. In some ways, there are parts of her that are indistinguishable from me.”

It’s a well-considered, many-layered, articulate answer. If you’ve been paying attention to Gyllenhaal’s work, this won’t come as any surprise – she has a knack for creating depth where it’s least expected. In conversation, this is expressed via a lot of paragraph-long answers, prefaced with requests for clarification and plenty of questions of her own. Ask her something general and she promptly asks for it to be reframed more specifically. She knows who she is, and she doesn’t want it to be misinterpreted in the slightest.

But it’s on screen that the actress’ gift for nuance is most apparent. She has a wide, guileless face that in repose looks dreamy, even wistful – like she’s expecting the worst but is determined to meet it. It’s an ideal screen for emotional display, and she used it to tremendous effect as Lee, the ex-mental patient who discovers love and the thrills of S&M with her boss (James Spader) in Secretary. The heady mix of beatific rapture and growing wonder that spreads across Lee’s face as she examines her reddened buttocks after he first spanks her is reason enough to watch the film. To learn of the reasoning behind the flickering emotions makes the scene resonate even more deeply.

“When I was that age, I had this idea that love was supposed to be a certain thing. It was supposed to look a certain way, you were supposed to want certain things – physically, intellectually, emotionally. I wouldn’t have acknowledged that I was falling into all those cultural ideas, but I was,” Gyllenhaal says. “What Secretary taught me was that, actually, love looks a lot of ways. I felt like the trap in that movie was to make it about sex when it was really mostly about love.”

She talks a lot about traps: how to avoid them, and what you can learn from them. It’s the MO she used to construct her characterizations. Given the sort of roles generally available to young actresses – the girlfriend, the good girl, the bad girl- this is a smart way to work. It’s subversive without being self-defeating. For her first big Hollywood movie, last Christimas’ Mona Lisa Smile, about Wellesley coeds in the early 1950’s, Gyllenhaal landed the role of the bad girl- and then proceeded to turn her into a not-so-bad-in-fact-really-quite-nice-but-still-sexy girl.

“I think originally Giselle was supposed to be a bit of a victim, like ‘oh poor girl, she’s sleeping with everybody,’” she says. “And she’s supposed to cry about it at the end. But I really didn’t want to go down that road- that was the trap there. I tried to say, ‘What’s wrong with sleeping around a bit when you’re in college?’ All these other girls are nice and they’re 20 years old and they’re getting married. I can sympathize with the desire to shake things up.”

Strip Search, the HBO movie that Gyllenhaal’s just made with director Sidney Lumet, focuses on another character who likes to shake things up- an American graduate student in China who’s accused of being part of a terrorist group. The scenes cut between Gyllenhaal in her Chinese cell and a Saudi Arabian student charged with the same crimes in New York, drawing the parallels between the two. Like Homebody / Kabul, Strip Search is pointedly political, something the actress is proud of. “I feel like things are getting so bleak. There’s something really important about taking action for what you believe in. To get people emotionally involved in something intellectual and political is important.”

Though she’s racked up some impressive credits in her career, Gyllenhaal has only been acting professionally since she was 21. As a child, she and her brother (actor Jake) would put on plays at home, which prompted their mother to ask them if they wanted to take acting lessons. “In the same way that she’d say, ‘Would you like to take a swimming class?’ or something- we did all kinds of after-school activities,” Gyllenhaal says quickly, as if to dispel any idead that her mother pushed her into performing. In fact, though bother her mother, screenwriter Naomi Foner, and her father, director Stephen Gyllenhaal, work in Hollywood, their daughter doesn’t consider herself an industry insider. “My parents were never celebrities,” she says. “They worked on movies- that was their job. And seeing them go up and down in that world makes me a little wary of buying into all the attention I’ve been getting recently.”

Though she always took acting seriously- “I didn’t act the way little kids do,” she says. “I threw my whole self into it” – Gyllenhaal opted for college on the East Coast rather than starting the rounds of auditions in L.A. She went to Columbia, where she earned a degree in English literature. She attributes her aptitude for digging beneath the surface of a role to this training. “English is a really good major. It teaches you to analyze text , and that’s a very good skill to have, to be able to read something or hear something and say, OK, but this and that.” It’s not something you’ll read in most actress profiles, because most actresses didn’t go to college. That Gyllenhaal leads a relatively normal life – living in New York with her boyfriend, actor Peter Sarsgaard; cooking; going to friends’ art openings; trying to get past the first five pages of Wings of a Dove; remembering to take her vitamins- is what makes her so easy to like. She’s not a princess, she’s a hard-working woman, and that’s far easier to identify with.

Take her approach to the red carpet, a place where many a promising actress has stumbled. (One bad choice in gowns, and the press will never let you forget it.) It’s to Gyllenhaal’s credit that she can laugh at the shallowness of the whole thing and still pull it off with her own sense of style still in-tact. For her first foray into this territory, the 2003 Golden Globes, for which she received a nomination for her role in Secretary, she wore a short white lace Chanel frock cinched at the waist with a pink bow. It was playful yet sophisticated, and the fact that she wore it with pointy black pumps, the way she would have if she were going out with her friends, instead of the regulation matching strappy Manolos, made it all the more adorable- and real. “I really don’t like to have stylists pick my clothes,” she says. “It doesn’t feel like me when they do. Your clothes say something about who you are, and I want to be clear about who I am, not someone else’s version of me.”

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